• Chambers, Whittaker "The New Pictures." TIME Magazine. Monday Feb. 12, 1940.

In a famous review of The Grapes of Wrath, then editor of TIME Magazine Whittaker Chambers defiantly raves about the film. A former Communist party member and Soviet spy, Whitaker ended up defecting from the party and becoming one of communism’s most notorious and outspoken opponents. After breaking ties with the Communist party in 1938, Whittaker went on to become an editor of TIME.

It is interesting to note that Whittaker mentions a brief, albeit scathing criticism of Steinbeck’s original book version of The Grapes of Wrath. Whittaker refers to the Pulitzer Prize winning novel as “propaganda” and containing “phony pathos.” Whittaker goes on to qualify that the type of person who is to gain the most enjoyment from observing The Grapes of Wrath is the one who enjoys “seeing a picture for picture’s sake.” Whittaker claims that The Grapes of Wrath could quite possibly be “the best picture ever made from a so-so book.”

Whittaker mentions that the book translates so effectively to film for a couple of reasons: “credit belongs accidentally to censorship and the camera.” The self-censorship of the Production Code Administration is namely what Whitaker is alluding to here. The editorial criticisms of the American economic system made by Steinbeck are also eliminated from the picture. What remains is an authentic tale of a U.S. farming family. “They wander, they suffer, but they endure.”

This article is highly significant because it not only points out the thematic difference that exists between Steinbeck’s book and Ford’s film, but it also provides a historical context. The P.C.A. at least to some extent allowed The Grapes of Wrath to become a film so long as the theme shifted toward a positivist one. There could not simply be a thrashing of the economic conditions in Great Depression America. Instead, it was necessary to instill some sort of hope in the storyline which culminates in the form of an enduring family struggle.